Curry - a closer look

The other week I posted pictures from our last curry night, leading a certain person to suggest that we had another one soon. I thought that actually sounded like quite a good idea. So, here are the closeups that I didn't do last time!

Yellow rice, with cardamom seeds and cashew nuts. The yellow comes from turmeric - sometimes I use a bit of saffron, but this is more expensive and less strongly coloured.

Carrots, cauliflower and pepper in coconut sauce. I can't remember what spices went in this one.

Chickpeas with tomato, onion, fresh mint and garam masala

Daal. Sorry about the mankiness of this picture, I swear it tasted better! This was the faffiest of the four things I made that night. I made it nice and thick by boiling the lentils with minimal quantities of water, stirring constantly and adding more water as needed (read: as needed to stop it sticking to the bottom of the pan and ripping the non-stick off...) I 'fried' some cumin seeds and coriander in very hot margarine to get the flavour out: this took three attempts as I kept burning the seeds, they really only need to be on the heat a couple of seconds!

All the pans on the stove. The 'veg only' on the green saucepan dates back to when I lived in a shared house with people who needed reminding not to cook meat in my pans. The blue ones don't have this on because I lived alone when I bought them.

Of course, any single one of these can be made on its own or with plain rice! Sometimes having a few things can make it more fun though. Also, we had enough leftovers to make up the next day's lunch with minimal faff.

Bread

I started making bread nearly a year ago, when I realised that wanting toast wasn't the best reason for making a trip to the shop when I didn't need anything else! I had a few early experiments involving beer, but ended up buying yeast and trying to make bread fairly regularly. My boyfriend is addicted to the stuff, which provides added impetus.

Loaves prior to going in the oven. This is mainly white with a bit of wholemeal flour and some seed mix.

And after coming out of the oven!

Making my own bread wasn't really motivated by veganism, as there is plenty of choice with shop-bought bread. Price-wise, it probably works out more expensive than Tesco Value sliced white, but I've calculated that it is cheaper than buying quality bread ready made. I make my bread by hand, hence the slightly uneven shape (that could be sorted by buying loaf tins, but why should I? My mother also makes her own bread, so I grew up with sandwiches this shape!). A breadmaking machine may simplify some things but is also a bit of a financial outlay, especially if you aren't sure how much use you'll get out of it. Incidentally, you can also get decent bread from quite cheap flour - some of the lighter, crustier loaves I've made have involved Tesco Value white flour, albeit with a dash of wholemeal. If I have to buy discount brands (which I do fairly often) then better to get the raw ingredients rather than the finished product!

Another Thursday lunchtime

My lunch yesterday:
-Half a tin of mixed bean salad
-50g or so of wholewheat couscous
-1 large carrot cut into sticks
-A banana

I think I should have incorporated ricecakes or a flapjack or something else extra and carby, because I was hungry enough to have to buy a packet of crisps in a hurry later.

New sidebar

My sidebar now contains a blogroll called 'vegan blogs I read'. These are the blogs I feel the need to check every day or two for updates, rather than an exhaustive list!

Tofu scrambler

We don't have this as often as we used to, purely because tofu seems to be more expensive and/or harder to find the further north you get. (anyone want to confirm or deny?) Nonetheless, it is possible to get locally-made tofu - with a cool name on it, no less! - so this is one that comes out occasionally.

The empty packet

The crumbled tofu in a bowl. This particular brand crumbles easily after being pressed with kitchen paper to get the water out. You'll have to imagine me doing that, as the boy wasn't available for photographic assistant duties.

Crumbled tofu sprinkled with chilli, cumin and tumeric. Horseradish is the best flavouring to use but I haven't been able to locate any here yet.

Cooked scrambler in a wok. I fried the tofu mixture with a bit of margarine to start with, then added soy milk to give it a more scrambled-egg-like texture. Sometimes I add some vegan mayo (Plamil or Granose, would recommend the former for this as the latter is more like salad cream), but this is strictly optional.

I'm sure you'd love to see a picture of my boy in his dressing gown eating tofu scrambler and looking appreciative, but I'll spare him that one. For now. ;)

Casserole

This is a bit of a regular around here - in fact, it is a week or so since I took these pictures, and I have another one in the oven as I write.

The basics: veg over dried stuff!

The raw veg - potato, parsnip, swede, carrot and tomato (I forgot the onion until after taking pics!) - sprinkled with pepper and paprika. I vary the vegetable content and spices each time. I think this one also has pearl barley and lentils under the veg. Today's offering has dried soup mix in.


Gravy - this can just be Bisto powder with water, but sometimes I add tomato puree or yeast extract for extra flavour.

Veg soaked in gravy, ready to go in the oven. I normally put it in at about 180 centigrade/celsius, and it needs an hour to an hour and a half to cook everything through. Not fast, but fairly low maintenance in that it doesn't need anything doing to it during this time!

Seedy

Pumpkin seeds, the by-product of both cooking with pumpkins and making halloween lanterns. They've been washed and dried and are about to go in the oven...












And here they are after half an hour or so! We've been snacking on them a bit, but most are going to be used for making bread...

Gap in posting!

Thursdays are my 'busy' day, my schedule runs from 9-630 and five hours of that time is spent directly in the classroom. I get an hour for lunch, and what I eat in that hour has to keep me going potentially from 1-9pm, so I tend to put a lot in there... This week it was:

• Sandwiches (on homemade bread, more about that later) with herb pate
• A Linda McCartney sausage roll
• A small bag of carrot and yellow pepper sticks
• A piece of homemade apple and pumpkin pie, again more about that later
• A packet of plain crisps from the vending machine

This is a bit of a mixture of pure carbs and vitamin content, of fast and slow energy, which is what I need!

Curry night!

This is a more complicated meal than I'd normally make, but it was part of a 'date night' with my boyfriend. Of course each of the curries can also be made individually.

The whole plateful - spinach and chickpea, lentil dhal, bombay potatoes (a bit mushier than I'd intended) and yellow rice with sultanas.












The (slightly messy) table, showing vegan raita (made with Provamel yoghurt), poppadums and mango chutney.

Happy World Vegan Day!

So, I'm back. The reason for my absence is down to a couple of major events - submitting my PhD thesis and moving from Nottingham, England to Stirling, Scotland within the space of a week - and the aftermath: settling in in a new flat in a town I've visited once in less-than-perfect circumstances, adjusting to a new routine, going from living alone to cohabiting, planning new classes, trying to write articles to publish (ok, I'm doing that right now but procrastinating on blogspot...) - you get the general idea. I didn't consciously choose World Vegan Day to make a comeback, but it seems fairly appropriate. Although I haven't officially signed up for Vegan MoFo, I like the sentiments behind it, so this month I will be trying to keep up some kind of routine in order to show exactly what vegans eat and why (except for one of the meals pictured in this post) it isn't that scary!

So, without further ado, my halloween menu

Beetroot soup for lunch - looks gory enough but is in fact completely vegan!













Sunday dinner consisting of roast potatoes, parsnip and pumpkin, swede and carrot mash and stuffed peppers topped with cheezley. Not especially 'scary' but since Halloween was on a Sunday this year I thought it would work...

The price of being single

So apparently one of the disadvantages of being single/living alone is that you can't bulk-buy food. Not true! I'm not single now, but am in the last month of a three-year stretch living on my own. I was single for about three or four months of that time. The periods on either side of that have been spent in distance relationships. I've always bulk-bought food whenever I could, although for some things it depends on being able to get a lift from the shop.

Here's a list of stuff that can be bulk-bought in a small household:
-Tinned food - baked beans and tomatoes at least, these often come in multipacks or catering tins (if you have a freezer to keep the remainder of an opened tin)
-Dried beans/chickpeas - either store them dried and boil when needed or (more economically) boil a whole packet (or two if you have a big enough pan) and freeze what you aren't using that day or the next
-Pearl barley, on the same principle as above
-Lentils
-Rice and pasta
-Couscous and quinoa, if you have a weigh-and-save type shop around that sells these things
-Flour (but watch for damp and mites!)
-Spices

And also a whole load of non-edible (well, I don't see them as edible!) things like loo roll and dishwashing liquid.

I know this isn't strictly a vegan issue, but it does at least highlight that being a vegan doesn't cost a bomb!

The thinking vegan?

I came across this in the Guardian this morning. Now, I'm quite thrilled that veganism is getting any coverage in a mainstream newspaper from a vegan perspective, in particular coverage that is not about health scares or 'pushiness' or for that matter 'terrorism'/'extremism'. But I have to say parts of it make me wonder.

Now this first bit, I can understand:
I stare because I'm fascinated by the fact that these intelligent, thinking people actually eat the flesh of dead animals. This seems to be the point at which their ethics vanish. They recycle, eschew the use of cars, buy fair-trade coffee and bananas, use environmentally friendly detergent. But when it comes to the moral and environmental issue of meat consumption, their desire for food they enjoy the taste of, the sensual pleasure it gives them, overrides any ethical considerations.
I have, after all, been there many times - including with vegetarians who eat dairy and eggs. I can respect that you (anyone reading this who isn't vegan) might hold different opinions and make different choices to me. This isn't a boundless capacity - there are points where respect and even tolerance stop - but if you are actually friends with me then you are unlikely to have reached the boundary. However, if you are a friend or anything more than a casual acquaintance, you are likely to have a pretty good idea of where we disagree. So you know that I am at the very least curious about where your ethical standpoints come from.

This gave me more pause for thought:
Now, I avoid having meals at the homes of my meat-eating friends. I'm uncomfortable with the hassle that feeding me causes them, and the inevitable awkward conversations about food. I wouldn't express my real views, as I know I would offend them. I could never tell them that their lack of conscience about what they eat creates a barrier between us. Or that it means we will never be quite as close as we could be.
I don't think I've ever turned down an invite on this basis, although I may have been denied a few. I'm not secretive about being a vegan, so anyone who invites me over is likely to be doing so in the knowledge that there are certain things I don't eat. Over the years several non-vegan friends have risen to the challenge and done a bloody good job of it. Furthermore, on many occasions said non-vegans and their other guests have also eaten vegan or vegetarian food and, unless they are better bullshit artists than I give them credit for, seemed to rather like it. Oh, and there are also times I have had non-vegan dinner guests, given them vegan food because hey that's what I cook, and had more compliments than complaints.

I can understand, certainly, why this vegan and others might have issues eating at non-vegan friends' houses. If you don't have intimate knowledge of people's domestic habits, you might not know for sure how careful or otherwise they have been about avoiding cross-contamination. This boils down, no pun intended, to the relationship you have with the people in question beyond the vegan issue - the friends I mention above are all people I trust not to cross-contaminate, play stupid pranks and so on. (Including the guy who sees my meat avoidance as a good thing in the context of a tapas bar, as there is more left for him) There is an element of shyness to overcome about saying 'by the way I'm a vegan', maybe having to explain why you made that choice as well as the more prosaic details of what you do and don't eat. Sometimes it seems easier to say no. But being open about your choices (maybe not preachy in this context) and practical about what you do and don't eat, offering suggestions if necessary, is the best way to calm potential panic about feeding a vegan. (As a thought experiment, I have asked myself what I would need in order to deal with a guest with significant allergies - I'd want them to name some favourite meals, be specific about what I need to avoid, and preferably not cloud the issue too much with other factors) It occurs to me that avoiding interaction with non-vegans just fixes the idea that vegans are 'weird' and antisocial, that our food is strange and inedible to anyone else - whereas accepting these interactions, with the challenges involved, could go some way to normalising veganism in people's minds.

Veganniversary!

Veganniversaries or other such expressions are something I miss out on a bit, because a) my veganism took a while to get going and b) it had a couple of 'off' patches so I've actually 'gone vegan' two or three times in the last fourteen years. But I certainly don't begrudge them to anyone else, so congratulations to Priya C of The Green Diva who has been vegan for a year!

Link lurve: Amy Clare on human privilege at the F-Word

I have seen too many feminists (and anti-fascists and other progressive types who I agree with on so much else) be derisory about animal rights, and far too many AR activists return the 'favour' and argue that any human cause is an unnecessary drain on time or even a conspiracy to keep activists distracted from the 'real' issue of animal rights. It is often posited as a zero-sum choice for what you believe in. What you do is a different matter - it is an individual choice how each person uses their limited time and energy, and choosing one issue over another is fine in that regard, but it doesn't mean you have to give up caring about anything else even if it does take rather slacktivist forms at times. Can you tell a raw nerve has been hit?

Anyway, this is meant to be link lurve not link whinge (although that might be a useful feature sometime, haha) I bring you the following post: Amy Clare at feminist blog The F-Word asks if you have 'Checked your human privilege lately?'

A quick sample: 'Some have likened becoming a feminist to taking one of the pills in The Matrix - suddenly, you can see the world as it really is. You become aware of every instance of oppression, and when others then dismiss this oppression, it is unbelievably infuriating. I feel the same whenever the topic of animal rights comes up in conversation, and omnivores shrug their shoulders at me and declare that they enjoy meat, so why should they stop eating it? For me, this is the same as hearing a man say that he enjoys rape porn, so why should he stop watching it?'

Link love: Knocked up and vegan

To quell any rumours (and any fears on Ben's part should he see this post in google reader, haha! Really tempted to remove the disclaimer to see his reaction...) I am NOT pregnant.

That aside, Chloe Jo Davis at Crazy Sexy Life has made a post on being a pregnant vegan, which I felt like posting in case I or anyone reading my blog might find it useful now or (in my case) in the future.

Sweet potato and chickpea curry

I made this last night to keep my boy's strength up for couple of busy and stressful days ahead!

You will need to get:
-4 largeish sweet potatoes
-1 onion
-1 tin chickpeas
-Peanut butter
-Cumin and your preferred curry powder
-Cooking oil (I usually use sunflower)
-Tomato puree

And then:
-Chop the sweet potatoes
-Boil the sweet potatoes for half an hour and leave to stand for a bit so they go mushy
-Strain the sweet potatoes
-Heat the cooking oil in the bottom of the pan, add the sweet potatoes, a chopped onion, about a tablespoon of tomato puree and the curry powder
-Stir in the chickpeas
-Add some warm water until the mixture starts to look like soup. Simmer it for a while - stirring occasionally because this stuff can stick to a pan - then add a couple of tablespoons of peanut butter and stir in thoroughly.

Eat with rice. Not pasta this time!

Pasta with peppers and chickpeas

This one definitely comes into the erzatz-but-tasty category - I came back from a trip yesterday and launched straight into a day and a half of being constantly out at work, so needed to cook something nice from limited resources to sustain me for an evening working at home!

Ingredients:
-Half a pepper (yellow in this case)
-Three small cloves of garlic
-Cooking oil (I use sunflower)
-Tomato puree
-Water
-Chickpeas
-Pasta
-Splash of balsamic vinegar (optional)

Put the pasta (about a coffee mug per person) on to boil, adding a splash of oil and a pinch of salt
Heat the oil in a wok or frying pan, cook the pepper in it for about five minutes and the garlic for a bit less
Add the chickpeas in with the pasta*
Add the tomato puree and some water to the peppers and garlic
Add the balsamic to the veg sauce bit
When the pasta is cooked, mix everything together.

*If you use frozen chickpeas, rinse them first with cold water to seperate them and take the freezer taste away. They will defrost while in the boiling water. Duh.

30 Days of Veganism - my ideal experimental vegan!

Bryn Woznicki is a student journalist, a lifelong omnivore, and currently at the halfway stage of an experiment whereby she goes vegan for 30 days and documents this in her paper. I was dubious when I first heard about her - my experiences of omnis who do experimental veganism haven't always been the most positive, at best they manage it with a few fairly standard problems for the set period and are pretty happy to go back to their old diet at the end. Bryn, however, seems to be made of sterner stuff!

She sticks to be vegan diet with, as far as I can tell, only one or two slip-ups; makes more than the barest nod towards the wider vegan lifestyle, eats in mainstream food outlets and tries out vegetarian ones, and feeds her apparently very fussy meat-eating friend vegan food which he eats without complaint. She doesn't waste time being a martyr, which is very refreshing after the likes of Jay Rayner and Oprah. The jarring note seems to be the attitude of her vegan boyfriend to these proceedings - maybe she is just blogging the more newsworthy interactions and he is completely sweet and helpful behind the scenes, but he seems to do rather a lot of judging and hectoring.

It's a pearl!

Today, I wanted a meal I would normally make with couscous. I have all of sod in the house of a couscous-y nature. It was 6pm on a Sunday, when shops tend to be shut, and I had very little energy to actually go out and hunt down grains that might not fill me up so well anyway. What I do have is pearl barley. And, amazingly, it worked out pretty well.

Pearl barley, I have to admit, takes a while to cook - basically you cover it with cold water, bring it to boil and simmer it for an hour. On the other hand, I've found it freezes pretty well (in terms of being edible afterwards), which means it is always worth doing double quantities and freezing some for another time.

So, today I did that - I used one of my smaller coffee mugs full of dry barley, simmered it for an hour, then took about half out to cool down ready for freezing. Then, to go with my stir-fried veg, I flavoured what was left in the pan:
-1 tablespoon olive oil
-1 teaspoon each of cinnamon and nutmeg
-a pinch of salt

Turned out ok and probably filled me up better than couscous would have!

Linky lurve - Barbies and bunnies!

In honour of National Vegetarian Week, the lovely Ms Vanilla Rose provides a list of ways to help animals, some of which translate beyond the Barbie arena!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Cross-pollination

A post at my other blog, on the subject of genetically manipulating animals not to feel pain...

Quick fancy pasta sauce

This was my treat at (almost) the end of the week, using up some courgettes and peppers I've had for ages and the rest of the tin of tomatoes I opened yesterday. It could have stretched to two helpings with a bit more pasta and some bread on the side. You could use a saucepan (tho not an easily heat-damaged one) or frying pan instead of the wok.

Ingredients
-Olive oil, heated in a wok
-Two large mushrooms, chopped
-One large courgette, chopped
-Half a pepper, chopped
-Three cloves of garlic, sliced
-Half a dozen or so olives, halved (very much optional, but I happened to have some in the fridge)
-Half a tin of tomatoes, with juice

Add the ingredients down to garlic to the wok in the order listed, unless you are the opposite of me and prefer nearly-raw mushrooms and overcooked pepper in which case do what you like. Cook the veg in the oil, stirring around a bit, until cooked. Make sure the olive oil doesn't start to smoke - turn down the ring if it sizzles too much. Add the tomatoes and a bit of water - simmer for 10 minutes or so. Eat with pasta, in case you need telling. (And no, Ben, I personally do NOT intend to use spaghetti, but make no judgement on what anyone else does. Except you because you expect me to eat what you make... I love you even if you do eat pasta that looks like WORMS.)

Veganicity on a shoestring #3 - bean and veg casserole

Any raw foodists reading this will probably be throwing their hands up in despair at the turn my blog has been taking lately, but I am trying to eat healthily in the winter - with a very active life and no central heating at home - on a very tight budget, so the meals I've been posting fit that need pretty well. A lot of it is pretty consistent with 70s wholefood diets, except for the fact that I sometimes use tins! (oh and also white rice/pasta...)

This made one-and-a-half me-size helpings! (clue: I'm not small or currently off my food)

Ingredients
1 standard tin chickpeas
2 large carrots
Half a large onion
Half a standard tin of tomatoes (tomatoes are one vegetable that actually benefits healthwise from the cooking/tinning process, apparently it promotes some kind of useful nutrient)
3 teaspoons Bisto
1 tablespoon tomato puree
About two coffee mugs of water

Put the bisto and tomato puree in a saucepan and slowly stir the water in. Turn the heat on/up under it and keep stirring until the gravy thickens.

Slice the carrots, chop the onion, and put them in an ovenproof pottery dish (my blue glazed one is older than me, my mum had it first...) with the chickpeas and tomatoes. Stir so the ingredients are evenly mixed. Add the gravy so it covers everything.

Turn the oven up to 180/200 C (flexible depending on what else you want to put in there - I had it on higher at the start because I was making bread, since the oven happened to be on). Leave the casserole in for about an hour, until the carrots are cooked through. If you don't have either a dish with a lid or a handy piece of tinfoil, keep it on the bottom shelf and give it a stir at some point so the stuff at the top doesn't get burned!

Veganicity on a shoestring #2 - vegetable stew

Sadly I don't have my mother's dumpling-making talents! Anyway, this is what I was eating on Saturday - I had a 'crash' day where my body tried to recover all the energy used and not topped up over the past week, so although this made three or four helpings I ended up eating the whole lot...

Ingredients
A pot of stock - see the previous recipe for how I make this
One large potato
One sweet potato (or another normal one - I had these because they were on special offer)
Three large carrots (good way to use up frost-damaged ones)
Half a tin of tomatoes (leftover from the other day)
Beans, probably the equivalent to a normal tin - I used chick peas and butter beans from the freezer though.
Three cloves of garlic.

Basically you 'make' this by putting the lid on the pot and leaving it to simmer for an hour! You can also add pearl barley, pretty much any root vegetable, or indeed onions except I didn't have one to hand...

Vegan on a shoestring #1 - 'Boring bolognese'

I hasten to add that this isn't actually boring, it acquired the tag in question when I was a student with limited cooking facilities and ended up eating the stuff several times a week. This made enough for two helpings, most of my day's food intake given that I was working from home. Just enough for it to be nice and not boring. Maybe the fact that I poured some leftover wine into it helped...

Ingredients:
A pan of stock, either from a cube or from swilling out yeast extract jars. You know, the ones that don't have enough stuff in to scoop out and spread on toast but it seems wasteful to bin!
A tablespoon Bisto (powder not granules)
A tablespoon tomato puree
Three largeish carrots
Three sticks of celery
Half an onion
Half a normal tin of chopped tomatoes

Swill the yeast extract jars out with warm water. Stir slowly into the bisto. Add the tomato puree. Top up with more water and bring to the boil.
Chop the carrots, celery and onion and place in the boiling stock. Add the tomatoes. Turn the heat down and leave to simmer until the liquid has thickened and some has evaporated.
Eat with pasta. You don't need me to tell you how to cook that.

A health post

Before I embark on a series of cheap recipes, here's a list of vegan superfoods from the Green Diva.

Chocolate!

With Valentines day less than a month away I want to put a plug in for my friend Wendy, who runs a one-stop shop for vegan chocolate! She has flavoured truffles, creme eggs and chocolate hearts, among other things. Oh, and keep the site bookmarked for Easter as she also does large eggs and chocolate bunnies, if you can bring yourself to eat animal-shaped chocs which I never can.

New Year Veganicity

I'm not keen on the idea of new years resolutions, but a few have occurred to me regarding veganism so here they are!

• To be less guarded about my veganism and the reasons for it when among non-vegans, and not interpret questions as jibes unless they are really obviously meant in that way.
• To try to rise above jibes, assume that the person is either masking genuine curiosity or else not worth my energy getting angry with.
• To join in discussions at work about food and cooking even if it is sometimes very frustrating to hear about meat etc.
• To get involved in activism again, although this may have to be after submitting my thesis!
• To make myself available to people who are curious about veganism (eg through formspring)
• To be more proactive in raising the subject of veganism, although I may stick to 'safe' situations for the time being.
  
• To make more effort to share food, subject to affording to do so, in particular to make more from-scratch food for parties and so on since (amazingly) no-one in my life (apart from my friend's pre-teen daughter who now avoids meat herself) has ever objected to chocolate cake or pizza even when they know it is vegan.
  
• To avoid factional bickering in the vegan/AR movement - I do have a horrible tendency towards morbid curiosity about these things, not to mention getting embroiled in them (particularly when my personal feelings about individuals get into the mix), and this isn't healthy. Negative energy is the most painful sort to expend. Pretty much every approach is useful and necessary, and I need to remember that regardless of feelings about the individuals concerned.
  

Vegan pledge

This is a bit late for new years resolutions, but still worth posting now as it can be done at any time of year. The Vegan Society is running a Vegan Pledge initiative encouraging non-vegans to swear off the animal products for 7, 14 or 30 days. You will be sent a special vegan starter pack and linked up with more experienced vegans to get advice. I would recommend that people starting from complete omni-ness should probably do 7 days - vegetarians might like to consider starting with 14. Of course there is nothing to stop you doing one after the other, or indeed sticking with veganism afterwards.

At a more personal level, I can be found on formspring if anyone has vegan-related questions.

S.O.P.H.I.E. video

Sophie Lancaster was murdered just for looking 'different'. S.O.P.H.I.E. stands for Stamp Out Prejudice, Hatred and Intolerance Everywhere. This video is an attempt to raise awareness of the need to speak out against all hate crime, including that directed at subcultures.

And yes, this is slightly off-topic for a blog on veganism, but if our reasons for being vegan coincide at all then you'll understand.

Flexitarians

An online acquaintance posted this, and it made me wonder: why do flexitarians need special resources? I wouldn't be feeling quite so spiky about the idea if I hadn't run across a number of blog and message board posts and even *gasp* offline conversations regarding the idea of 'accommodating' flexitarians. That is, vegetarians/vegans needing in some form or other to do so. Now, I thought the point of being a flexitarian (rather than vegan, vegetarian, ova-or-lacto-veg, pescatarian, or other label that refers in the dietary sense to eating or not eating a specific range of foods) was that you didn't need to be accommodated. That you ate the 'right' thing for any specific context. Surely the right thing for a context in which you are surrounded by vegetarians/vegans is to eat what they do? Be truly 'flex'-ible and refrain from whinging about the lack of animal products? Wow, anyone would think you were an average omnivore trying to gain a trendy label - oh, wait...

Note 1: yeah, I know 'vegan' goes beyond diet, and that this is the key to why some are vegans and some are flexitarians in the first place, but since these conversations have tended to involve food I have stuck to that angle for now.

Note 2: I have nothing against people who are trying to reduce animal product consumption but aren't (yet) ready to go all the way. These are not the people being slated here, especially the ones who may be vegan in the future! But if anyone complains about the lack of meat/dairy in vegan/vegetarian spaces or contexts, I really doubt the sincerity of any attempts to cut down on these substances...

Linkies!

I've added a few more links in General Vegan and Shinies. Nb: I use 'non-animal-tested' rather than 'cruelty-free' when the product ranges in question aren't exclusively vegan. If I post a link it indicates that the company has a decent range of vegan products, but that you may need to check the ingredients online or in the shop before buying.

My top 10 favourite foods right now

Just to demonstrate how wide a range of vegan food is available! Some of these involve 'scary' vegan ingredients, others don't. Some are easier to cook than others. The order varies with my mood!

1: Chilli, particularly with tacos/nachos. The deluxe version of this involves Cheezly (Redwoods) and Sour Supreme (Tofutti), but these can be done without. The tomatoes, beans and spices are what does it...
2: Gigantes, with either rice or couscous depending on whether the nearest clean container is a saucepan or a bowl
3: Peanut curry with veg and/or tofu - the basic sauce can be made out of creamed coconut and peanut butter
4: Welsh Rarebit, especially if I can find somewhere that sells vegan worcester sauce! That is in short supply in my city for some reason...
5: Leek and potato soup
6: Corn chowder (actually I want this today, but need to actually buy a tin of sweetcorn first...)
7: Dhal with chickpeas. Preferably with rice, but couscous will do.
8: A beanburger with lots of salad. I don't always want to cook from scratch!
9: Lasagna/Moussaka (these would be a lot higher if they weren't such a faff to cook!) - being a philistine I prefer these with salad and chips rather than anything more culturally appropriate, but rice and bread are also good...
10: Pizza! (with or without cheezly depending on whether I have any in... sometimes just dumping a load of veg on it works fine!)

Gigantes!

Gigantes are spicy oversized baked beans which tend to be eaten as part of a Greek meze. This is rather an improvised recipe but tastes good anyway! I have some in the oven right now, which is what prompted me to post this here...

Recipe:
-1 small tin butter beans per person (so large tin for 2 i guess)
-tomato puree
-olive oil
-garlic (about 2 cloves per person)…
-a red pepper (or green or whatever)
-dried mixed herbs

Pour beans into an oven-safe dish, keeping the brine they are sold in. Stir in tomato puree until the liquid thickens. Pour in a fair bit of olive oil - enough to cover the beans. Chop the garlic and the pepper and stir them in along with the herbs. Bake at 220C for an hour. Eat with couscous or rice.

Product rave: Blue Dragon stirfry sauce

Specifically the sweet chilli and soy variety. There are other vegan sauces in the range, but that one is my favourite. It isn't hot, but it adds that bit extra flavour to a stir-fry that is just vegetables. (I know there are plenty of flavours in there already, but sometimes I do feel like decorating it...) A pouch contains about enough to go over two helpings of veg without making things excessively runny. It also managed to avoid getting burned onto the bottom of my wok today! And of course extra kudos to Blue Dragon for labelling their vegan products...

Leek and potato soup

Ingredients:
1 leek and 2 decent sized potatoes per person
Water (duh)
Margarine
Seasoning
Soy milk/cream (optional)

Cut the potatoes up fairly small, boil in the water until they get to the slightly overcooked stage.
While the potatoes are boiling, fry the chopped leeks in the margarine. Add the seasoning - if you're being really basic just use pepper, garlic also works.
Mash the potatoes a bit - they don't have to be completely mashed, more a lumpy puree. (you will notice that I don't own a blender. They can be useful, but are not essential to life!)
Add the leaks and any residual margarine. Simmer everything until tastes merge.

And of course I came to work with no lunch so am feeling hungry after writing this!

Attitudes

My attitudes, to be exact! In case anyone was speculating about the posting gap, I have neither vanished nor quit veganism. I am less of an activist than I was, although I was going that way when I set this blog up.

My commitment to veganism hasn't changed, but my circumstances have and hence the ways in which I relate to veganism have adapted.

Until a little over a year ago, I was in a relationship with a person who was what might be called a professional vegan, as in he was employed by an organisation which exists to promote veganism. So in addition to my own vegan friends I also spent a lot of time with the vegans he worked with. As a person who was just re-stablising as a vegan, this was a mixed blessing. On the one hand I had it affirmed to me time and again that I was right to be vegan, and this was good in that it strengthened my resolve, especially at times when I did have to argue my case. It also meant that most of the cafes I ended up in would at least be vegetarian and have some sort of vegan selection, that if we went to the pub someone would always know which beers were ok, and generally that the people around me had some level of vegan intuition without being prompted. On the other hand, it meant being around people whose definitions of what a vegan did beyond the very basics and what got prioritised varied wildly. There was also a bit of point-scoring from some (although by no means all! or even most...) quarters. At any rate, 'vegan' was part of my identity there as a sort of default setting, and sometimes the grounds on which people communicated with me.

For a few months after that relationship ended, I was single and became a bit of a health fanatic. I don't mean in any way to make this sound like a bad thing - I needed something to focus on, and had been very ill for a long time that time the year before, so trying to up the percentage of raw food and learn about proper nutrition was useful. This was the best time for promoting veganism, due to a combination of factors. I was affirming my own belief, unrelated to who I may have been going out with, which meant that people took me a bit more seriously. I was working long days, which mean *always* taking at least one meal to work with me. As a result I was often whipping tasty food out of my bag in a crowded break room, which obviously led to questions about what I was eating. I would discuss the 'whys' of my veganism if it came up, but the 'hows' (ie the practicality of having a tasty, healthy varied and yet reasonably cheap diet while working long hours at multiple jobs!) tended to be seen by most people as the main issue.

For a little under a year I've been in my current relationship. The person in question may well be 'the one'. However, he is 'just' a vegetarian and not with any moral basis to his decision, so I have had to explain veganism. He has one vegan friend other than me, and that person lives in America. My personal life involves a lot more outreach than it used to, just to make sure he and I can eat together! So far it seems to be working. He respects me for sticking to my principles even though he doesn't share them. It does mean, however, that the outward face of my veganism is a lot more orientated to showing how a vegan can live a 'normal' life, whatever the baseline might be there. Again, I will give the whys if anyone asks, but often people are more interested in the 'hows'.

My life is not a constant round of vegan advocacy as it may have been a few years ago. My time and energy is limited - I am finishing a PhD and working multiple part-time jobs at any given time, and am too knackered to do much some days. But I think that merely being vegan - and doing it 'properly' rather than giving in and eating something non-vegan to avoid being an 'inconvenience', preferring to make suggestions about what you can eat, how you will make up for it later and alternative places to go for food next time - leads to some extent to a certain base level of advocacy being necessary.

Dark chocolate is good for you!

I has chocolate cravings! My best friend initially triggered this last night by blogging about her cravings - after all the shops I can see from my window had shut! Then a glance at Activeg compounded this, with a link to a news story that dark chocolate is good for you! So I may yet stop at the newsagents on my way to work...

Product review - Amy's non-dairy burritos

I've been feeling a bit less than great lately, so thought that since I was in Holland and Barrett I would get something quick for an early dinner. I seem to remember that the vegan Amy's products were only recently released in the UK (correct me if I got that wrong!), so this seemed like a good moment to try it.

I have to say that if I hadn't got these on special offer I would have been a bit disappointed. The wrapping is somewhere between tortilla and very heavy pastry, and it was difficult to hack into even though I soaked it in salsa and tofutti sour supreme. The filling was ok, although basically it was just jazzed up refried beans. There is nothing in this that I couldn't make from scratch (well, if using pre-bought wraps counts as scratch...) in a way that I would prefer. Having said that, there is nothing really *wrong* with these and I may get more at some point (while H&B are still selling everything at buy one get one half price) as they'd be a useful thing for a packed lunch on a long day at work.

Curried carrot soup

Ingredients:
3 carrots per person
2 cloves garlic per person
Enough margarine to coat the bottom of a saucepan
Spices - I used nutmeg, tumeric and cumin
About a (British, if there's a difference) tablespoon of tomato puree
About two tablespoons (same proviso) of grated creamed coconut
Warm water

Putting it together:
Grate the carrots
Melt the margarine in the pan
Cook the garlic and grated carrot in the margarine for a few minutes
Stir in the spices followed by the coconut
Add the tomato puree
Add water (stirring it in) and simmer until the water takes on a carrot-y flavour!

I am eating a *lot* of garlic right now, to try to stop freshers' flu taking any more of my time than it has over the past week!

On a less fun note...

Something really weird happened the other day. I found myself being grossed out by fake meat. That does not normally happen. I've been a vegetarian for about 18 years now and a vegan on and off for what adds up to about half of that. I've eaten fake meat whenever I could afford it in any context where I'm confident no-one will try to sneak the real thing into my food.

But the other day, my boyfriend was visiting and I made us a cooked breakfast, involving tofu scrambler, Wicken Fen sausages and Redwoods rashers. The sausages and scrambler went down fine, as the latter should have since it was the only part of the whole meal to take any effort on my part. The rashers? Not so much. The boy had never tasted them before. He avoids eating meat due to being grossed out by it. I knew he may not like them. That isn't the issue. The problem came when he gave me his rasher, minus the bit cut off the end that he'd tasted. I took a bit and for some reason started thinking about pigs, pig farms, pig shit - all the most off-putting things to have on your mind when eating, even if the food contains no actual pig! And by that point, I was feeling too bad to even finish the last of my baked beans or toast.

I don't mind so much going off fake meat (provided I don't have the same reaction to the tempeh burgers at the Alley Cafe!). It isn't a huge part of my diet. I've been without actual meat for so long that I don't intrinsically need a direct replacement. There are no nutrients in these products that can't be found anywhere else, often in more natural foods. The problem is that it happened so suddenly, in the space of one Saturday breakfast! On the Thursday I was happily picking the wretched things up in the shop and feeling excited about making cooked breakfast, which I really cannot stir myself to do on the full scale when alone, and two days later I was pondering throwing up the two bites I had managed from one of them.

What sucks even more is that I have the rest of the pack in my fridge! I would offer to put it in the post to one of you, but I doubt the things would keep...

Sweetcorn chowder!

Yes, in true vegan style I am apologising for a long absence by giving you the know-how to make one of my favourite meals! This is actually pretty quick to make, and also useful if you have a cupboard full of tins and no time to shop for fresh stuff. (Obviously only if at least one tin contains sweetcorn, haha)

Ingredients:
1 small tin sweetcorn per person (large tin if you're hungry!)
2 cloves garlic per person
Enough margarine to melt over the base of a saucepan
Enough cornflour to absorb all the margarine
Spices - last night I used nutmeg, cinnamon, paprika and cayenne pepper; another version involves mustard powder.
Enough soymilk to turn the paste into soup

Putting the ingredients together:
Melt the margarine in a saucepan. It should cover the bottom but doesn't need to be too deep. If using Marks and Spencer margarine, get the non-dairy one that *isn't* low-fat as the other is crap for cooking and smells a bit like wax when melted.
Add the sweetcorn and garlic to the margarine, stir frequently, get the corn warmed through
Add spices to taste
Remove the pan from the heat, add the cornflour and stir in well to avoid lumps.
SLOWLY add soymilk, stirring often. Note that the mixture will thicken when back on the heat, so make it a bit more liquidy than you will eventually want.
Put the pan back on the heat (this isn't one to eat cold!). Keep stirring until the mixture warms up and thickens.
Serve with bread, croutons, or if you're me this week crumbled tortilla chips. Don't ask.

Irony on rye to go

Mary Martin posts this heartwarming tale of Subway franchisees fighting the approval given for plans to open an abbatoir in the same building as their sandwich shop. On the grounds, lest it not be obvious, that having such a thing out the back would stop people coming in and buying bits of dead animal for lunch. Wouldn't that be a shame...

Er, possibly not...

So, I hear about this blog called 'This is why you're fat'. At last, I thought, an explanation! Then I looked at the blog. Every.fucking.thing on there is meat-based. So I'm left still wondering...

'Uncontroversial' vegan food

I'm not, I must admit, 100% happy with generating a discussion - on a regular basis - just by eating. Fair enough, it can act as a form of outreach, and g_d knows I've been doing little else along those lines lately. And of course it gives me, in principle at least, a chance to make other people think about what they're eating. On the other hand, sometimes I want to be able to feed myself and others without having to discuss, justify, judge or explicitly change the subject. You know, like a 'normal' person. On that score, I'm still trying to walk the line of what exactly to feed non-vegans/non-vegetarians should one or (in this case) more wind up in my house of an evening. Obviously buying *non*-vegan food is out of the question. And asking people to bring food would lead to having non-vegan leftovers around the house, not being much use, or else I'd have to pressure vegetarian overnight guest to take stuff home on the train. So anyway, I've been putting a bit of thought into what exactly to provide.

The first question was what to rule out. Actual chunks of vegan cheese might have been going a bit far. Really obvious fake meat didn't seem like a great idea either. I figured Redwood's deli sausages might be ok, though - out of all vegetarian sausages, they are the best to have cold. Anyway, I'll try putting them out.

So what else is there?
-Crisps - three large bags of the things, can't remember which brand but it was on special offer at Tescos and is in the Animal Free Shopper, so that should narrow it down.
-Hummous - home-made in a large quantity. I soaked, boiled and froze the chickpeas a couple of weeks ago, so last night I just had to take them out of the freezer, defrost them in boiling water and bash them up with a potato masher. (This being a zero-blender household until I earn a whole lot more...) I then added a bit of cold water (for texture), the juice of three quarters of a lime, a few cloves of garlic grated on the small-hole bit of the cheese grater that I normally don't use because vegan cheese gets stuck in it, and a small amount of olive oil.
-Pizza. This gets made tonight barring any disasters. Of course there's the vegan cheese vs no cheese question - think I'll make some of each.
-Bread - haven't got this yet, but I'm figuring a baguette and a packet of pittas will do.
-Couscous - probably won't do it this time, but if I get a rush of last-minute rsvps I can make some salad fairly quickly. Avoiding it for now because it would involve giving people plates, which would then involve washing the plates... yeah, being lazy!

Then, I'd rather like to have an evening that doesn't focus on talking about food!

Grease is the word

Finally got around to making vegan fried eggs as demonstrated on video by z-list nude model Count Vincent Von Vegan.

For the benefit of anyone who doesn't have sound or video on their computer (me when at work, basically), the recipe goes something like this:
-Tofu, cut into very thin, wide squares.
-Margarine - Vince uses Pure, I use M&S own brand, we may come to blows over this at some point
-Bread, veggie bacon, mushrooms, ketchup and other accessories of your choice.

-Melt the margarine in a frying pan. Turn the heat down when it starts making crackly noises - there is a reason Vincent has his clothes on in that video, and it is less to do with decency (believe me) than with the little grease fountains that spring up when margarine gets overheated.
-Put the tofu slices in the crackling, spitting margarine - if you're thick enough to leave it on the heat like I did, use a long-handled spatula and keep your damn glasses on.
-Fry the tofu - turning over when one side gets brown, binning if either side gets black - until the edges go frilly and it bears a superficial resemblence to a fried egg.

-Toast two slices of bread. Put one on a plate. Cover it in the fried tofu and other stuff. (tip: if using mushrooms, fry them as well. raw mushrooms, eek) Stick the other piece of bread on top.

Also, please comment here or at KMA if you figure out a vegan way to replace the gloopy yellow bit in the middle of a fried egg. I used Plamil mayo this morning, but it wasn't the same. If you can smear it around your mouth, kiss Vincent and get a picture of the event, all the better.

In blogger terms, these guys are my neighbours

Kiss My Asparagus

Eva is really lovely, Alex is a bit deranged but basically ok, the main thing is they both have some great ideas about what to do in the kitchen. Mostly to do with cooking.

Delightful domestic disasters

Just to demonstrate that this blog isn't unrelentingly positive(!)...

Firstly, my sprouting lentils are completely defunct. I think I may just have left them too long. The chickpeas are ok, although I guess I'll have to eat them fairly soon to stop them getting in the same state. I need to be a bit more organised about learning how long it takes each thing to sprout and planning my lunches around that.

Secondly, my stock turned out GREY. My mental troubleshooting guide came up with a couple of suggestions for why.
1: It had burnt lentils in. Not the best idea, but I thought I'd try. Never again.
2: I left it, with the veg peelings still in and the heat turned off, for about seven hours while I went out. Hence, it went grey and started to taste and smell of the least pleasant component (cabbage, or more specifically the sulphur it contains) rather than smelling rather nicely of spring onions as it had when I left the house.
I didn't eat it. There is very little vegetable matter I won't eat, so this is saying something. It won't stop me trying again though!

Actually, given that I know what went wrong and how to fix it, maybe that is still a little bit too positive for a Monday morning...

Hot foods for coldy vegans

So, in my department teaching assistants have to go to the lecture for their module. This is partly so the students get to know who we are, and partly so we know exactly what was said in each lecture. Enter freshers' flu. Half the first years coughed their way through the lecture yesterday. So by the afternoon, be it real or psychological, I felt a cold coming on. My strategy for colds is pretty much always to go home and eat spicy food to chase them away.

A few individual ingredients that are useful here:
-Garlic. Raw if you can take it.
-Ginger. Raw or minced in vinegar is better than powder.
-Horseradish or wasabi (different nationalities of the same plant)
-Chilli, of any sort. Hot peppers will unblock your nose and probably a few other parts of your anatomy. (None of which you should wipe straight after cutting up the peppers - wash your hands or get a nasty shock...)
-Any normal curry ingredients. The hotter the better. On this occasion, it is a good thing if your eyes and nose run!

Last night's dinner ended up being miso soup with pasta and a whole load of heat-producing ingredients. I don't have a cold this morning, so either it did the trick or the whole thing was a psychosomatic reaction to being cooped up with sneezy freshers for an hour!

Recipe:
-A tablespoon miso buillion (Marigold, for those reading in the UK)
-Two mugs of water (didn't measure it this time, but I do know how much my smallest pan holds)
-About half a coffee mug of pasta
-1 teaspoon each of horseradish relish and minced ginger
-Half a teaspoon of wasabi powder
-A splash each of soy sauce and rice vinegar (I am putting this in everything right now because I only just bought the bottle)
Boil for about five minutes to give the pasta a head start on cooking. Then add veg. Last night I used:
-Two spring onions
-Two mushrooms, chopped v. small
-Two cloves of garlic. These should be as raw as you can stand, so put them in fairly near the end.

I have put broccoli and carrot in this in the past, but didn't have any broccoli and had been eating carrots in absolutely everything lately so wanted a change.

Some packed lunches

I think I've finally managed to incorporate making a packed lunch into my evening routine. So, here's a peek at what this vegan eats in a working week (in no particular order, as I can remember the lunches themselves better than which day I had them):

* White rice with soy sauce; steamed broccoli; sticks of raw carrot and cucumber; little pot of wasabi paste and Plamil garlic mayo. By 'steamed' I mean I scattered the bits of broccoli over the top of the rice for the last two minutes or so it was cooking. Dinner the evening before also involved rice, to avoid using an extra saucepan. I made rather too much rice - this is the only day where I ended up throwing anything away.
*Chopped cucumber, red pepper and tomato, butter beans, grated carrot and pine nuts, in olive oil, balsamic vinegar and a small amount of Provamel cream cheese. (this is basically vegan goat cheese, although you wouldn't know it wasn't margarine from the fairly basic packaging) This was the only time I have had to go and buy a snack, as the salad itself didn't fill me up. The butter beans were boiled from scratch over the weekend - I have some more in the freezer. Should have kept more out.
*2 lentil burgers (homemade, see a few posts down for the recipe); couscous salad with spring onion and olive oil; shredded lettuce; hummous
*Brown rice and chickpeas topped with shredded lettuce and grated carrot. I ate the salad and half the rice mix and was full. Resurrected it with extra salad dressing and mayo the next day.
*2 lentil burgers with quinoa, grated carrot and watercress. This meal was put together at midnight after a few glasses of red wine.
*Couscous salad with cucumber, tomato, spring onions and pine nuts, in olive oil and balsamic vinegar; topped with shredded lettuce.

For the sake of maintaining harmony in a shared office, I've steered clear of ingredients such as raw garlic in packed lunches. I may try to introduce small amounts of onion and see if anyone reacts. At any rate, what I can make is usually healthier than what the canteen has, and is certainly cheaper. It normally takes about half an hour to put something together - maybe longer if waiting for rice or couscous to cool down, but you can always go off and do something else during this period. I think there are a couple of lunches where 'special' products like vegan cream cheese or mayo are used, but this is largely based on what I had in the fridge at that point. They aren't essential.

Vegan MoFo introduction

Hi to anyone who finds this via the Post-Punk Kitchen's Vegan Month of Food page.

Who am I? I have one or two different names on the internet, so stick with the one you know. I'm currently in the last year of a PhD in political theory, subsidising my vegan food habit by teaching first years. I'm 28 and live in England. I love PPK and hate Skinny Bitch. I went vegan for animal rights reasons, but am coincidentally getting interested in eating more healthily due to having spent the last two winters being constantly ill. I also tend to like ducks better than humans: if you are a non-duck reading this, don't take that personally. My hobbies are knitting, cooking, reading murder mysteries and watching anime.

What will you find here?
*Quite a lot of food-diary type stuff, I have to admit. If you're new to veganism or to working in a place that has all of sod in terms of vegan options in the canteen you may find it useful. I've made it a sort of policy to bring in a packed lunch every day, and as this is still a fairly exciting development for me I tend to blog about it.
*Stuff about the difficulties of being vegan and how to get around them. I don't always find it easy in termtime, and am open about that in the hope that anyone reading this will see that 1) you aren't a failure if you have these issues and 2) they aren't insurmountable.
*Commentary on vegan products. Be warned, this is fairly UK-centric as it is nearly a decade since I've been in another country long enough to seek out specialist vegan stuff rather than just finding some nice bread and non-cheesy salad to eke out over a few days. Incidentally, I don't rely on these products even at home - they are somewhat overpriced, overprocessed and over here - but they have their uses.
*Veganism for people with very little money and less time. This is me and also most of the people I first learned veganism from.
*The gory details of my sprouting experiments - my windowsill is currently occupied by a sieve of lentils and a tray of chickpeas. In particular, expect to hear trumpets when I actually manage to produce something edible.
*What happens when I get around to making stock from the various bits of vegetable matter I've been collecting for the purpose. (Hopefully what happens is I have vegetable stock that tastes nice and is a lot cheaper than the buillion powder I normally buy. I have a feeling this may take more than one attempt though. Any tips are welcome!)
*And a whole lot of other stuff that I can't think of right now but may think of when my department's induction period is over and life is vaguely normal!

Food-centric posts made during October will be tagged 'vegan mofo', so they are easy to find. All the tags for this blog are displayed at the bottom of the sidebar, so feel free to explore.

Vegan MoFo

Because I don't have enough to do in October, I've signed up to participate in the Post Punk Kitchen's Vegan Month of Food. So I have a great excuse for all those 'what I ate for lunch' posts... :)

Dirty weekend

In the sense of getting my hands coated in lentil-burger mix, of course! The basic mix is about 50/50 lentils (soaked overnight and then boiled until they turn into a thick paste) and beans (from the freezer, given another boil to soften them up, then pounded with a potato masher. You could also do this with tinned beans.). I started out using just chickpeas, added white kidney beans at one stage because I had more of those in the freezer than I would use any time soon, and made a last batch of spicy burgers using red kidney beans. I think the chickpeas worked best in terms of holding the burgers together. I added various other ingredients - one batch of burgers had finely-chopped broccoli in, another grated carrot and the last lot just some paprika and tomato puree. This is one of those things that it is best to make in bulk - a lot of faff, not worth it for two burgers but certainly worth it for twenty. I now have two burgers for lunch today (with salad), four (burnt ones) in the fridge for use sometime this week and the rest frozen in packs of four for some other time when I feel like varying my diet a bit. I finished the burgers off by frying them, although if you were worried about fat content (lentils do absorb a lot of oil) you could try baking them. I may try egg replacer next time, due to falling-apart issues at various stages.

I have YET MORE LENTILS sitting in a sieve on my kitchen windowsill, allegedly sprouting although this is very much an experiment. I will not be devastated if I don't get to eat sprouted lentil salad at some point this week, really. I promise. (If this experiment does work, phase 2 will involve chickpeas. Everything in my life involves chickpeas at some point.)

I also did a batch of butter beans (all over the un-vegan names, d00d) and put some chickpeas on to soak until this evening. My bean saucepan is getting a lot of action. This might be because I've been eating Alpro yoghurts for breakfast most days since returning to work, meaning a whole new supply of yoghurt pots to freeze beans in.

Talking of the big saucepan... I've started collecting veg peelings and the like to make into stock. I don't have much idea if or how this will work yet, but if it gets a bit more use out of vegetable matter eventually destined for the trash (I live upstairs - no garden, hence no compost heap) it may be worth the faff. So far I have mostly carrot peelings and spring onion stalks.

The mind boggles

A special dose of weirdness courtesy of Suicide Food, with a combination of a scary product and some brilliant satirical writing. Livestock transporters are fucking creepy, and as for chicken trucks... totally something you'd want a minature version of for your kids. Gawd, so much talk about how raising kids vegan messes them up, but so little about how normalising the taking of life in an imaginative range of ways and locations might do the job of warping the little dears a whole lot more efficiently.

Mind the beans

Dried beans have many good points. They're cheaper and easier to transport than tinned ones, and they take up less space in the freezer than tins do in the cupboard. And you know how long they were cooked for - I often find myself boiling tinned ones, particularly red, before use, having been reduced to a puking mess once before. Here, however, is what can happen if you don't cook them properly. If you do cook them properly - putting them on to soak one evening and boiling the next, changing the water at each step - you're fine.
A vegan diet is a normal diet - complete with normal risks!

Vitamin watch #1

A more 'serious' post is brewing in my brain and drafts folder. For now - apologies to anyone who objects to supermarkets or taking nutritional supplements - I just thought I'd share the news that Tesco are labelling which of their vitamins are vegan. (Vitamin C in particular is difficult to figure out without a label, since the orange flavour is often carried in beta-carotene which involves gelatin derived from fish. Nice.) I have what feels like the start of a cold, and which I am determined not to let evolve into the start of a constant stream of illness (and of snot) like it did last year when colds were just the respite periods between worse things. This will not be made any easier when term starts next week, as first-year lectures are like germ hypermarkets. So, although my diet does naturally contain a whole lot of vitamin C, I felt it necessary to buy a huge bottle of tablets for the weeks ahead and also a smaller one of echinacea pills. And avoiding animal derived stearates, gelatin, bone meal, etc is a major pain in the arse, so I'm always happy to see a manufacturer using vegan labels. I'll keep posting on this when my supply needs restocking.

Salad days are upon us again

So after the weekend of indulgence described in the last post (hey, forgot to mention scrambled tofu - might save that recipe until I'm short of stuff to post...), I'm back to the healthier end of things for a while. (Not that the moussaka was especially unhealthy, but I have no illusions that vegan cupcakes are any different from non-vegan ones in that regard!) I was, however, getting a little bit bored of lunches that always seemed to be focussed on raw (usually chopped) carrots - tasty and healthy though they might be, a wider range of tastes and textures is always good. So today I had a salad that did NOT involve carrots, or for that matter garden peas since these had also featured heavily over the past week.

Salad:
Half an avocado, chopped
Half a tin of butter beans (200g)
One tomato, chopped
Two cloves of raw garlic

Dressing:
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
A few sprinkles of black pepper

Time off for bad behaviour

My moderately long-distance partner visited this past weekend, this being the first time we'd seen each other in a while for various reasons. It was a good weekend in many ways, some of which I don't feel like sharing on the internet. (For anyone who is still holding out for rude stuff on this blog, get a life or a new search engine...) A couple of things are worth noting, though, from a vegan point of view.

On Friday, I made moussaka for the first time ever.

Ingredients (Four servings - two for Friday night, one for my dinner after Gothling went home on Sunday, one to experiment with freezing stuff that has cheese sauce on):
-One aubergine (this is maybe the one thing that can't be substituted! Except maybe with sheets of lasagna, but that would still be a completely different meal)
-One packet of Redwood's cheating mince (would have been cheaper to use Realeat frozen mince or any brand of dried soy*, but this meal was meant to be a bit special.)
-One onion (red, but a white one would work just as well), chopped
-Two large carrots, chopped (could grate them if you have more than one grater or fancy washing the thing before doing the cheese sauce)
-About half a dozen mushrooms, chopped
-Enough sunflower oil to cook the above ingredients in
-Two tablespoons olive oil for the aubergines
-Black pepper, paprika and some dried mixed herbs.
-Quarter of a large tube of tomato puree (about 50g) (you may like to use less, I suspect I may generally go overboard with this, not least because it looks like pretty red knitting yarn when spurted around the pan)
-Half a block of Redwood's mozarella (any vegan cheese would do though - probably any brand, be it hard or cream or powder - but this happened to be what was in my fridge approaching its use-by date)
-One tablespoon each of margarine and cornflour
-Enough soymilk to make a fairly thick sauce

Equipment used
-Wok (or large saucepan you don't mind cooking stuff in oil in)
-Small saucepan
-Baking tray
-Cheese grater
-Knife
-Two wooden spoons and a spatula
-Roll of greasproof paper (no, I did not use the whole thing! Jeez!)
-Large, fairly shallow ovenproof dish

Method
-Slice the aubergine (slices about a centimetre thick)
-Place the slices on a baking tray or the grill pan (I was using an oven where the grill doesn't have a separate compartment), drizzled with olive oil. Grill until both sides of each slice are streaked with brown.
-Heat some oil in the wok. Add the mince and vegetables, and stir these together for a bit.
-Add the tomato puree, then pour in some warm water until the presence of liquid becomes obvious. Stir well and allow to simmer.
-While it is doing so, you will probably have time to get on with some other things around the house. (I didn't have much choice since they needed doing!) But what you absolutely NEED to do at this point is make the cheese sauce. To do this,
-Grate the cheese, if you're using the hard variety.
-Melt the margarine. Start it off at the highest notch on your stove, then turn the heat down when it starts to melt.
-Mix in the cornflour until all the margarine is absorbed.
-Add soymilk. Sauce should be fairly runny at this stage.
-Turn up the heat, stir the sauce CONSTANTLY. DON'T EVEN LOOK AWAY FOR A SECOND. EVEN IF YOUR NEIGHBOURS ARE SCRAMBLING AROUND ON THEIR ROOF. (Oh, is that just me?) Keep stirring until it starts to thicken.
-Add the cheese. Stir some more until it melts. If it gets too thick to be stirred easily, add more soymilk. (or water if you've run out of milk. It happens.) At this point, take it off the heat.
-Turn the oven on to 180 degrees centigrade/celsius.
-By this point, the liquid in the mince/vegetable component should be absorbed or evaporated and the aubergine slices should be nice and brown. Now is the time to put it all together!
-Take a large but fairly shallow ceramic dish. Spoon in a layer of filling, then place a layer of aubergine slices over the top. Repeat once. (but don't rinse yet) Top the whole thing with the cheese sauce, making sure some goes down the sides.
-Place the dish on a baking tray (makes it easier to handle later). Put it in the by now preheated oven, and leave it there for about half an hour. It's ready when the top is brown.

On Saturday we went for a very long walk involving dipping into the many and varied alternative/vintage/goth/totally random tat shops on Mansfield Road, and then doing some duck-spotting along the canal towpath. Between these two installments of walking, we stopped off at Dotty's cafe to fill up on sugar and caffiene. Dotty's doesn't have a website (yet?), but a map can be found here and the details are on Vegan Nottingham. It is basically a 50's-themed vegetarian cafe with the normal sort of food you'd expect plus a varying range of vegan cupcakes. In the evening we went to Sumac for some more food and vegan beer.



*Also, I hate using dry/rehydrated soy mince in the oven, as it re-dehydrates rather easily unless you drown it in liquid. I had a nasty experience with that when suffering from a throat infection and penicillin-induced vomiting, meaning that it scratched my throat on the way down and the way up. Delightful.

Just a quickie

If you have time or money to contribute to an animal sanctuary, Tower Hill Stables could really do with it.

Also, the term 'veganicity' exists elsewhere. Please note, I am not connected to them or they to me. (Although I've given them a link because a source of vegan vitamin supplements is always useful!) I don't sell or have any intention of selling vitamin pills or similar products, although I do buy them occasionally and sometimes offer high dose Vitamin C around my office in much the same manner as one might offer crisps, since dealing with large numbers of new students tends to be a great way of picking up all sorts of new coldy-things that then do the rounds several times before giving way to the next one... but that's sort of beside the point. And my namesakes, from what I see on their website, don't base their public personae on knitting, fun recipes or a fixation with ducks, so we're quite easy to tell apart. :) Also, in case anyone from there is reading, I do not use the name 'veganicity' in any commercial context. (Names I have used in semi-commercial contexts that haven't really got off the ground, and may use again: Purple Duck and Knitting Duck. Pretty distinctive really...)

Pesto

I made this today. Would describe it as raw pesto, but purists might dislike the fact that I ate it with cooked (albeit subsequently cooled down for the benefit of the hemp oil) pasta.

Ingredients:
Half a coffee mug of hemp oil (use sunflower - or olive if you prefer the taste - if you don't like the idea of eating lukewarm pasta)
Quarter of a coffee mug of chopped basil (fresh, not dried)
3 tablespoons pine nuts
2 tablespoons cashew nuts
2 cloves garlic, chopped (you can leave this out if you or the person you're most likely to snog hate it)

Method:
Place the basil in the oil
Crush the pine nuts and cashew nuts with a mortar and pestle if you have one, otherwise stick them in a plastic bag and bash repeatedly with the rolling pin or similar object
Chop the garlic fairly small
Mix the nuts and garlic in with the oil and basil

MyJuice, Buttermarket, Ipswich

Website

I went to meet a friend in Ipswich today. Since her working hours are more fixed than mine, this had to happen over lunch. Now, Ipswich isn't bristling with obvious places to get vegan food: my other lunches with this friend have been in, iirc, a (pretty decent) curry house and a pub. The Veggie Suffolk website lists one place, another curry house. There isn't a purely vegetarian cafe to hand, so until someone opens one there is an element of taking what you can get. MyJuice, while it doesn't have a huge range of vegan or any other food, certainly goes for quality in what it does have. I had 'My Vegan Delight' in panini form - this is basically falafel, hummus, avocado and some salad. You can also get it as a normal sandwich or a wrap, which I guess you'd end up doing if you got your lunch there every day just to vary things a bit. (Fyi, I think there were one or two vegetarian choices beyond this, plus one fish and two meat, so I didn't feel too discriminated against overall!) Drinks, however, are something this place has a huge range of - I think the various combinations of fruit and vegetable juices (and wheatgrass etc) took up three chalkboard menus, to the one small one occupied by food choices. Most of these seemed to be vegan. (I didn't ask whether you could get the milky ones with soy milk - might be worth a try) Prices are about what you'd expect - a panini and a drink came to about £7. (I think the panini might have been slightly cheaper!) The full address can be found on the website linked above, but basically it is right opposite Waterstones so that's the landmark if you need to ask directions.

Semi-raw satay salad dressing

'Semi' because I'm not sure if peanut butter counts. Since I'm not claiming to be a raw foodist anyway, that doesn't bother me. What matters in this instance is that the hemp oil didn't get messed up by heat. (I don't know whether it really goes toxic or how serious this is, but it certainly tastes vile when absentmindedly drizzled onto warm quinoa. You've been warned!)

Btw, if you are a raw vegan reading this and shaking your head over the peanut butter, is there anything that would work instead? I'd be interested to try it out, if so.

Ingredients (for one main meal serving of salad):
3 tablespoons of hemp oil
Juice of quarter of a lime (this made the sauce very lime-y, use less if that isn't your thing)
2 teaspoons peanut butter
A pinch each of chilli, cumin and ginger. (or use fresh versions grated)

Method:
Mix it all together in a cup. For some reason I find it easier to do this with two teaspoons held together. Then pour it on the salad of your choice.

Talking veganicity - forums

Readers who are especially sharp-eyed or looking for that sort of thing might have noticed that my sidebar contains a section called 'places to talk veganism'. The links basically do what it says on the tin. They are all places, broadly speaking, for vegans to talk about veganism. This does not mean they are all the same! So, for the benefit of anyone new to veganism in general or online veganism in particular, here's the lowdown...

Vegan Forum is the most active board I've found so far. Discussion tends to be at a civil and friendly level, with very little deliberate sh*t-stirring. Has a specific section for people who aren't quite vegan (although the expectation is that you'll get there sometime, preferably soon). This is generally my favourite online vegan hangout as it a) encompasses a wide range of discussion topics and b) seems to be about constructive discussion rather than points-scoring. If you're a new vegan finding your canvas-booted feet, this is the place I'd recommend.

Vegan Fitness, as the name suggests, is focussed on fitness, sports and exercise, with a vegan slant on things. My sometimes-enthusiastic and mostly half-arsed attitude to such things means that I welcome the encouragement you can get from such a place. It also has ethics, activism and general discussion sections. The best place to go to talk about nutrition, training diets and so on.

Vegan Freaks: abolitionist message board with probably the strictest screening process out of all the ones listed here. Can be fun and interesting, but not for the faint-hearted or anyone who isn't 100% sure of their commitment to veganism. Best place to go if you want tough love.

Vegan Represent: I don't hang out here as much, partly because it's quieter and partly because I signed up for it after becoming vaguely established in a couple of other places. Seems like a pretty good atmosphere, though.

Vegan Buddies: kind of quiet, but a good place to go if you're a new vegan wanting advice on certain matters, especially if you're scared your question will look 'stupid' on other forums. NOT the place to go if you like trashing less experienced vegans. (actually, neither is this - *sticks out tounge*)

There are also a number of yahoogroups. I haven't been on any of them long enough to review them, but expect a post at some point.

Salad for lunch!

Sort of a chunky coleslaw, I guess, except that I'd run out of mayo. (Plamil mayo is fairly easy to get - however, when I get some I tend to run through it fairly quickly, and not want to spend money replacing it right away. And I don't have easy access to a shop - even this one is a bit of a faff on the bus.) Anyway, the dressing ingredients I did have were just as good! Quantities here are for one person.

Salad:
1 large carrot, chopped
Small piece of raw cabbage, shredded
A tablespoon each of sunflower seeds and pine nuts
Two cloves raw garlic, chopped VERY SMALL unless you are used to it or a masochist. (If you have never eaten raw garlic before in your life, try using one clove to start with.)

Dressing:
Hemp oil - about a quarter of a standard coffee mug. Less if you prefer your salad on the dry side or hate dealing with that little slick of oil in the bottom of a bowl.
A teaspoon of ginger
Two or three drops of soy sauce, added on impulse but it tasted ok.

Method:
Mix it all together in a bowl. Then eat it.

More additions to the sidebar

A post brought to you by the part of my brain that doesn't necessarily read other people's blogrolls all the way through, with a dash of diligence and an ounce of egoism (ie the idea that anyone might actually find these links interesting! If you do, feel free to suggest more...)

Firstly, recipes and food-related resources has a couple of new entries. Veg Out and Veggie Heaven are guides to finding vegetarian and vegan resturants. Each one covers a wide range of countries. I have also added Vegan Village, a noticeboard for all things vegan; and Lembas, a wholesale supplier of vegetarian and vegan wholefoods. Lembas will deliver bulk orders within a certain radius of Sheffield, and are worth contacting if a few people are up for clubbing together to buy this sort of thing in. (Feel free to comment or email if you know of a similar company anywhere else in the country!)

The sidebar also now contains a section called 'global veganicity'. (Currently between 'other resources' and the picture of an eyeshadow, fairly far down the sidebar) Between the various sites linked, you should find something relevant to where you live or are travelling to.

The other new section is 'local resources', currently occupying the space between 'recipes' and 'other resources'. Right now it only contains local websites dealing with the areas I know about: in other words, I can vouch for their usefulness because I've either used them or been a vegan in the area before they were a glint in their webmaster's eye. Again, feel free to recommend more sites like this.

Under 'places to talk veganism' I have added Vegan Buddies, a messageboard set up largely so new vegans can get support from more experienced ones. This is the place to go if you're new to veganism, don't know many vegans, or worry about looking 'silly' because you don't know certain things. It is categorically NOT the place to go if you enjoy lambasting less experienced vegans for not being perfect!

Last but not least, VegCom has been accommodated (see what I did there?) under 'other resources'. If you need accommodation or a flatmate/lodger/tenant/(here my imagination runs dry, which is probably for the best) then this is the place to advertise.

Rarebitting on

Welsh Rarebit!

Ingredients:
Grated hard vegan cheese (In the UK that's Scheese or Cheezely - on this occasion the latter)
Margarine (in this instance Marks and Spencer dairy free - not the low-fat one, that goes weird when heated)
Cornflour (I have no cute little note to add to this)
Beer (optional - I used Co-op wheat beer, which says 'vegan' on the label. You only need a little bit, so make sure it is one where you can tolerate drinking the rest of the bottle/can!)
Soy milk (just a little) (You could probably use rice or oat milk instead - I've never tried)
Chilli powder, mustard, paprika, etc to taste
Bread (hey, nearly forgot that!)

Method
- Put the bread under the grill, let the first side toast while you do everything else
- Grate the cheese
-Melt the margarine: use enough that it fills the bottom of the pan. Start off on full heat to get it going, but turn the heat down as soon as it starts to melt. Otherwise it goes manky.
- SLOWLY mix the cornflour into the margarine, until it is all absorbed.
- Add grated cheese - there should be as much of this as there is of the existing flour/marg mixture.
- Stir until cheese starts to melt
- Add beer until the mixture turns into a smooth paste
- Add a bit of milk, but not too much. Just enough to make the mixture creamy.
- Add spices if you like that sort of thing
- Spread it on the un-toasted side of the bread and put back under the grill for a couple of minutes

You could also add a dash of worcester sauce - Life and Biona both do vegetarian ones that are available in most health food stores and Tesco if you go there. (A lot of worcester sauce, including Lea and Perrins, has anchovies in. Fishy business...)